The Result of University Cost-Cutting Measures . . .

the Plausible Deniability Blog takes up where the PostModernVillage blog left off. While you'll see many of the same names here, PDB allows its writers and editors a space away from financial strum und drang that torpedoed the PMV blog.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

In a recent essay in the statistics
blog FiveThirtyEight, Walt Hickey attempts to use statistical
analysis to learn something about the work of Bob Ross, whose show
TheJoy of Painting can still be seen on PBS nearly 20 years after
his death. While the Hickey's piece does help us understand
statistics, it does little to illuminate painting and is an object
lesson in how statistics can muddle common sense when misapplied.

Hickey's use of the word “given”
indicates that some certain image in a Bob Ross painting can be
statistically correlated with another, showing conditional
probability. Here's an example:

“The biggest pitfall people often
face is assuming the two probabilities are the same. The probability
that Ross painted a cloud given that he painted the beach —
essentially, how many beach paintings have clouds — is
(0.07)/(0.09), which is 78 percent. The vast majority of beach scenes
contain clouds. However, the probability that Ross painted a beach
given that he painted a cloud — or, how many cloud paintings
contain a beach — is (0.07)/(0.44), or 16 percent. So the vast
majority of cloud paintings don’t have beaches.”

In common usage, of course, “given”
represents not a statistical correlation but a real relationship—one
in which we reason deductively, not inductively. We might say “Given
that car's charging system is working properly, the problem probably
isn't the alternator.” So far so good: Hickey is just helping us
understand how statisticians use the word.

But here's where things start to get
sort of silly. Bob Ross is creating paintings, not taking snapshots.
Since this is art, the first thing we might want to consider is
Ross's aesthetic, which is representational. He presents lots of
clouds because he's painting landscapes, and, interestingly enough,
you kind of have to depict the sky in a landscape. And one way that
people know it's a sky and not, say, blue water, is by putting
clouds in it.

And while his paintings are distinctly
representational, he's also presenting a Romantic idea along
with his paintings, not just putting random objects together on a
canvas: clouds are a much more pleasing aspect of, say, a mountain
scene than they are of a beach scene. People associate good times at
the beach with cloudless days; mountains are impressive because
they're up among the clouds. In order for Ross to meet the
expectations of the aesthetic situation he is presenting, he's going
to be doing things this way as a matter of course. There's no need
for a complex statistical analysis in this case; all it requires is a
pretty simple aesthetic one.

Along these lines, if Ross is going to
present things representationally, he is bound also to present, for
example, more than one tree (since they tend to hang out together in
forests) and more than one mountain (since they tend to hang out
together in ranges). As Hickey puts it,

“What is the probability, given
that Ross painted a happy tree, that he then painted a friend for
that tree?

There’s a 93 percent chance that Ross paints a second tree given
that he has painted a first.What percentage of Bob Ross paintings contain an almighty
mountain?
About 39 percent prominently feature a mountain.What percentage of those paintings contain several almighty
mountains?
Ross was also amenable to painting friends for mountains. Sixty
percent of paintings with one mountain in them have at least two
mountains.”

Again, all this really reveals is that Ross was a
representationalist, something patently obvious to anyone who has
ever seen his show. It also may suggest that Hickey has never seen a
forest or a mountain range. Perhaps someone should give him
permission to back away from his spreadsheets for long enough to go
visit some of these places—or at least look them up on Google
Images. He might be surprised to find that they look a whole lot like
the paintings of Bob Ross.
Hickey goes on to break down how often Ross painted certain types
of clouds (“Given that there is a painted cloud, there’s a 47
percent chance it is a distinctly cumulus one.”), water (“About
34 percent of Ross’s paintings contain a lake, 33 percent contain a
river or stream, and 9 percent contain the ocean.”), and, notably,
cabins:

“About 18 percent of his paintings feature a cabin. Given that
Ross painted a cabin, there’s a 35 percent chance that it’s on a
lake, and a 40 percent chance there’s snow on the ground. While 72
percent of cabins are in the same painting as conifers, only 63
percent are near deciduous trees.”

This again fails to take into account the Romantic aspect of
Ross's work. Cabins on lakes and cabins in the snow are simply more
pleasant from a Romantic point of view than cabins, say, surrounded
by the dirt and grime of the city or, for instance, cabins engulfed
in flame because they've just been bombed by the Luftwaffe.

Hickey goes on to speculate about how these things showed what
Ross did or didn't like in a painting. One may presume that a
person's overall aesthetic approach is based on personal preferences,
but there are also a set of expectations within that aesthetic
approach that help guide the artist. “Like” isn't a terribly deep
description of an aesthetic approach, but once that approach is
understood, it's generally predictive. A statistical analysis works
the opposite way: by trying to figure what is generally predictive
from looking at masses or classes of individual instances. This can
be quite useful, but it sort of misses the point when it comes to
painting and art.

Hickey was so interested in this idea of figuring out what Ross
liked that he went and asked Ross curator and business partner
Annette Kowalski about his work. One the one hand, this is good:
Hickey realized the limits of what his data could actually reveal.
Kowalski noted that what's striking about the work from Ross's show
was what they largely left out, which was people.

Here's where we look at the other hand. First, we can go back to
Ross's clearly Romantic aesthetic: being surrounded by people rather
than happy trees and majestic mountains and such is a total downer
from the Romantic point of view. Wordsworth didn't get all poetic
about bankers and bricklayers; because he was a Romantic, he
trended toward daffodils buffeted by breezes.

But even though he mentions it, perhaps the most obvious thing
Hickey and Kowalski seem not to be taking into account is that Ross's
show was a teaching program, in which he created a fully-realized oil
painting in a 30 minute format, and almost in real time. In
other words, Ross is going to choose the forms that a novice painter
could easily replicate and that he could easily demonstrate within
the confines of the program. He may have avoided people simply
because figure painting is notoriously tricky, expensive, and
time-consuming, which is why they have separate classes on it in art
school. The show was, after all, the Joy of Painting, not What
a Pain in the Butt It Is to Paint People. Further, figure
painting often requires live models, frequently nude ones, which adds
a layer of logistics and cost, and which would have been difficult to
get by PBS censors.

As helpful as statistical analysis can be, it's misused if it's a
substitute for common sense. It's also ill-used if applied by people who simply
don't understand their subjects and the principles by which those
pursuing those subjects act. These principles are generally obvious
to those who understand the subject matter, or they are clearly
stated by the people engaged in them. Statistics might reveal when a
person is being deceitful—for example when a politician's voting
record, statistically, doesn't match her rhetoric. But there's no
indication that Bob Ross was doing anything other than painting
joyfully, and with his audience squarely in mind.

Friday, July 4, 2014

No one “deserves” what they get.
We're all struggling with our circumstances and our choices (or lack
thereof) the best we know how—and what we learn about how to engage
in this struggle is rarely adequate to the circumstances we are
dealt. Woe be to the teenager so coddled as to never have been
overwhelmed prior to being faced with adulthood.

Perhaps instead of trying to apply a
predetermined system of justice on a universe that doesn't recognize
its relevance, we should look at the situation a person is in and ask
“What is the best way to alleviate suffering for everyone
involved?”

I suppose one could argue that even the
principle upon which this idea rests—that suffering should be
addressed, and, if possible, overcome—implies a system of justice.
And perhaps it does. But the point of reducing things to a simple
maxim is to avoid wasting time and energy trying to place the blame,
to avoid propagating waves of anger and resentment by casting forth
punishments and rewards based solely on statute, faith, or opinion.

For all our apparent abundance, we
actually have a dearth of resources in personal energy and time, and,
increasingly, in physical resources as well: in food, clean water,
secure housing. The notion that we have much to spend on doling out
holy edicts ignores the desperate realities faced by suffering people
and, in the end, circles back on us and dooms even we who have
pledged to “help” make the world a better, more prosperous place.

The most we can do for justice is to
stop believing we have a monopoly on defining it and to stop imposing
its outcomes in ways that reinforce our own sense of superiority.

A three-legged dog can be perfectly happy with a juicy bone and a friendly hand to pet him. But a human being can be perfectly miserable in the midst of absolute luxury. The same ability to continually reflect on what's wrong, to compare in our minds our current situation to an imagined ideal, is also the key to our success as a species: the ability to imagine into being technology and art, to ponder great ideas and see them out.

We are fated to be simultaneously brilliant and unhappy, at once astoundingly successful and stultifyingly dissatisfied.